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5 Action Items for Social Marketers in 2018

February 14, 2018 by lavina-jahorina.com

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Social marketers typically serve as a hub within a company, fielding one-off requests and meeting external needs while attempting to maintain their own campaigns and content calendars with social-specific goals.

No big deal, right?

Creative Campaign Booster Kit

Just kidding. Here are five ways you can take action in 2018 and beyond to gift yourself a little more success and sanity. I’ve taken into account the latest social network developments and organizational thought leadership. I hope this helps.

1. Shift Your Facebook Strategy Pronto

In Q4 2017, Facebook made algorithm changes to surface less viral video content in an effort to reduce “time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.” Citing the recent division and anxiety in our world, Mark Zuckerberg announced his intention to make sure Facebook is beneficial “for people’s well-being and for society overall.” This means the following:

“You will now see more content from friends, family and groups that lead you to interact with people, and less public content that leads to more overall time spent.” This means that Facebook users are more likely to see user—not brand—content which sparks comments and conversation, rather than branded videos which receive a ton of likes or views.

What you can do about it: Start a Facebook group around your brand, or a challenge that your brand has organized for its devotees, like a fitness challenge. Add this component to your next integrated campaign, and don’t use it as as sales tool—use it as an audience development tool.

Throw your influencer program into overdrive, and interact with these influencers regularly on Facebook, whether that’s in the form of a Facebook Live or the influencer’s comment section. Community management, emphasis on community, is more important on Facebook than ever.

Finally, use an employee advocacy platform like Bambu to share stories that will amplify your brand.

“Making sure the information you see on Facebook comes from broadly trusted and high-quality sources, in order to counter misinformation and polarization.” Facebook wants to prevent false news, hate speech, and other abuse.

What you can do about it: You don’t have to do anything, unless you’re conducting one of the activities mentioned above. In which case…stop.

“Over the next three years, we know video will continue to grow, so our job is to build video experiences that help people connect with friends, family, and groups. That’s why I’m excited about Watch as a place to connect with people who have similar interests, and it’s why we launched Watch Party where friends can watch a show together.” Facebook isn’t giving up on video, but it’s pushing viewers towards a specific part of the platform where they can watch and interact.

What you can do about it: Whether you’ve already got a robust video strategy or are in the initial stages of building yours out, invest here.

“We expect Stories are on track to overtake posts in feeds as the most common way people share across all social apps.” But we’ve been saying that for awhile now.

2. Build Your Deck

Build a template for your presentation deck now, so you can simply plug and play as the year unfolds. I suggest this reporting cadence:

Obviously, you do not need a deck template for your daily analysis. But I recommend having a short deck template for your weekly reporting to your immediate team, a medium-length template for your entire team/C-suite, and a longer template for your quarterly or yearly content audit and analysis. Simply swap out screenshots from your favorite social analytics solution and social profiles, as well as your bullet point takeaways.

4. Focus on the User, Not the Buyer

A joint study by SAP, Siegel+Gale, and Shift Thinking suggests that digital brands don’t just do things differently; they also think differently. Where traditional brands focus on positioning their brands in the minds of their customers, digital brands focus on positioning their brands in the lives of their customers. Furthermore, they engage customers more as users than as buyers, shifting their investments from pre-purchase promotion and sales to post-purchase renewal and advocacy.

This is a process we think a lot about as social marketers, in particular, since we tend to take a wide-lens view and have access to buyers at every stage of the journey.

Because of the public, always-on nature of social, your job doesn’t end when the purchase or consumption happens—it continues throughout the entire buyer’s journey.

For this action item, I encourage you to think about where your strategy is focused today. Awareness? Consideration? Decision-Making? This will help you understand which gaps you need to fill and which metrics you should be focusing on to track and prove growth.

5. Audit Your Content

Identify your best-performing content and most popular channels so that you can build future content that caters to the interests of your audience and share your content in the most effective way.

Using Simply Measured Social Analytics, you can compare the performance of all of your social channels side by side. We can identify Twitter and Instagram as our two most-engaged social channels, and then dive deeper to determine why engagement was so successful.

About Me

Bella Sanderson

Bella Sanderson British born, American by choice.
She worked as journalist in Asia for 15 years, was a NBC Radio Correspondent for Nepal and BBC stringer in HK. In HK, Sanderson studied acupuncture and Chinese medicine with Chinese healer Dr But Chak-kei and tai chi with Martial Arts Master Ha kwok-cheung.